


When the Wind Begins to Howl

by simplyprologue



Series: Careful the Tale You Tell (Children Will Listen) [16]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Charlotte-fic, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Gen, Kid Fic, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-09
Updated: 2015-02-09
Packaged: 2018-03-10 20:36:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3302669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three small children, a very loud blizzard, and one queen-sized bed. The McAvoys, 2021.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When the Wind Begins to Howl

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Inspired by all the snow that my home state is currently being drenched with, and the [thundersnow](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundersnow) of my youth. Featuring me trying to shoehorn the Charlotteverse into a canon setting, so yes you get to see Teddy and also Josie (who was named in habit of recycling of Sorkin names for Sorkin universe OCs; Josie is named after Joey Lucas and Josephine McGarry both) in this installment, which takes place shortly after Charlotte's seventh birthday at some point in late January 2021, meaning that Will is 60, Mac is 47, and Teddy and Josie are four and three, respectively. 
> 
> (Because hey, if Michael Lohan can have a kid at 57, so can Will. Also the Donald was 60 when his youngest was born, so... celebrities... I've justified this a little too much to myself, if you can't tell.) 
> 
> No warnings. Thanks to Emily C, Meg, Clare, and Lisa for their encouragement. Title is taken from "All Along the Watchtower" and my BSG roots.

It’s more of a habit than a rule. Their bedroom door gets locked sometime after ten or eleven, after they get the kids settled into bed and finish whatever from the office they’ve brought home with them. The last thing they do before going to sleep at midnight or one is to open it. If the door is locked, the kids know to try to wait. If it’s open—

It’s not an infrequent occurrence for them to wake up with one of their children having crawled in between them during the night. Josie, most often, since they moved her from the crib to Charlie’s old toddler bed six months ago, usually popping in sometime right before sunrise to get the last few hours of sleep with them but rarely spending the whole night. That would be Teddy, and his lackluster immune system and predilection for high fevers. And at seven Charlie still gets her time in, their budding insomniac who at times can only sleep if one of them is holding her in their arms so tightly that she can’t move.

They’ve been handed three poor sleepers for children.

Locked door time is _very_ important.

The knee replacement this past summer tends to dictate how it’s spent: with Mac on top, threatening to stop if Will even looks at her in a way that may indicate that he wants to flip them over.

Panting hard, he nuzzles her cheek as she tries to regain her own breath.

Manhattan is in the middle of enduring hour four of blizzard conditions, and they’ve decided to prepare for the impending snow day in the manner of their choosing. If nothing else, they’re securing domestic felicity between the two of them in the event of their children reacting negatively to being cooped up inside their brownstone all day, since the storm isn’t supposed to move out to the Atlantic for another day and a half.

Kissing his cheek, she stretches her legs and shivers as aftershocks ripple down her thighs.

“That was nice,” she says on the end of a contented sigh.

His voice still registers in the lower octave it reaches during sex. “I think it rated more than nice.”

Mac snorts, drawing her knees up to frame his hips. “Thanks.”

Their attempt at a debrief is interrupted by a loud clap of thunder that is immediately followed by long and loud gust of wind, and not thirty seconds after that they hear a nearly equally loud force smack against their closed door, and then a sharp, piercing wail.

Cursing, they disentangle themselves from each other and the sheets. The wails continue, accompanied by a plaintive cry of “Momma!” and then, as is natural, “Daddy!” and it takes Mac four tissues to clean up the mess between her legs before stealing Will’s discarded boxers, getting her legs through them as she pulls on a t-shirt inside out.

The belief that they are terrible parents is brief, but existent—they at least do _try_ to not laugh at their youngest, who has ostensibly just rammed into their door as fast as her short legs will carry her, and scramble to make themselves presentable _enough_ at least so that Josie won't inadvertently tell any tales to unsuspecting members of the ACN staff. (Or worse, Leona Lansing or Rebecca Halliday.) Will’s pajama pants, slingshotted across the room, wind up in his face and are barely crossing up over his hips when Mac unlocks the door and opens it to their three year old balled up on the ground with her blanket.

Face red and tears streaming down her chubby cheeks, Josie lifts her arms up to Mac.

“Momma,” she cries, and one arm falls back down like she wants to put her thumb into her mouth, but reconsiders.

The mental gears meshing and forcibly reversing from freshly-fucked wife to doting mother, her face softens as she leans down to lift Josie off the ground into her arms. Hoping that Charlie and Teddy are still asleep, she closes the bedroom door again. Then, cradling Josie’s head, she inspects her daughter’s forehead for the red spot she knows is there.

“Oh, honey,” she murmurs. “You’re alright.”  

The litany of “Momma” continues as Mac carries her to the bed and sits down at the end of it.

Will, now clothed (an undershirt having been procured from where it landed earlier in the evening, on the corner of the flat screen, and he’s already kicked Mac’s panties, which had _somehow_ wound up in his pants pocket, under the bed) maneuvers himself across the mattress until he’s sitting next to them. Silently, he offers Mac to take Josie into his lap but she shakes her head, letting their little girl curl herself around the familiar angles and curves of her body.

“You’re okay, Jo,” she murmurs. “I know, that was scary.”

Mac looks at Will over the top of their daughter’s head, raising her eyebrows and flicking her eyes at the bathroom.

He takes the hint, and goes to clean himself up.

(Or at least try to tame the sex hair that Mac likes to leave him with.)

It takes a while for her cries to subside, a true testament to the strength of Josie’s lungs, and she develops a case of the hiccups as Mac tries to rock and soothe her. Limp, she hangs off Mac’s shoulders, blinking at Will as he rubs her back. He’s rather proud of himself; if this had happened to Charlie a few years ago, he’d be petitioning Mac that they take her to the ER, blizzard or not.  

“Did you run into the door?” Mac asks, trying to keep the amusement out of voice.

Her lip wobbles. “Thunder woke me up. Loud.”

“Well at least it wasn’t us,” Will mutters, pushing Josie’s blonde curls off her forehead to get a better look at the welt that’s forming.

Mac elbows him.

Thumb rubbing gently over the small bump that’s rising over his daughter’s eyebrow, he asks, “Do you want me to get you some ice, sweetheart?”

Josie shakes her entire head, her hair flurrying about her cherubic face.

“Nu-uh.”

Stroking back her hair, Mac rests her head atop Josie’s, continuing to rock and soothe her. “What do you need?”

“Stay here,” she answers, as assertive as a child of her age is capable of being. Her legs lock around Mac’s waist as a declaration of intent, and the rumble of distant thunder that follows only strengthens her commitment to sleeping between her parents for the night.

Her parents, on the other hand, refuse to yield to her demands.

(Yet, anyway. As Mac would readily attest, Will generally caves to any requests for physical affection from the kids, even if said kid should be in bed, getting ready for school, or doing their homework.

Or Charlie’s personal favorite, climbing into bed with Will late on a Saturday morning to avoid her chores. And he, the massive pushover, just wraps his arms around her and goes back to sleep instead of making her clean her bedroom and fold her laundry.)

Will returns to inspecting the bump on Josie’s forehead.

“I think you need some ice, honey,” he says. “That’s gonna bruise.”

Leaning back, Mac tries to crane her head to get a look at it. “How big is it?”

“Eh.” He shrugs, holding up one hand with his thumb and index finger about an inch apart. Eyes widening, Josie wriggles in Mac’s grasp to free one of her arms, pointing to where her head hurts.

The demand for a _kiss_ is apparent, and non-negotiable.

Combing her fingers through Josie’s hair, Mac brushes her lips across her daughter’s forehead. “You can stay for ten minutes, Josie. While we ice your forehead. Sound good? Then we’re tucking you back into bed.”

“But the thunder is _loud._ Why is there thunder?”

“That is a very complicated questions with a very long answer—” Will begins to explain, stalling as he tries to remember what he Googled earlier when Charlie had asked, but giving up in the face of being unable to distill it down to a preschooler’s level of understanding barometric pressure and lake effect. “Sometimes there’s thunder, but only during very big blizzards.”

“Is the blizzard so big?” Josie asks, and then yawns.

“So big,” he answers instead, drawing the backs of his fingers down the curve of her cheek.

“I don’t wanna go back to bed, I wanna stay here with you.”

Mac sighs, looking at Will with eyes that beg him not to cave so that maybe, _maybe,_ they can have a round two. The interceding exchange of facial expressions (as Josie buries her face in Mac’s shoulder and begins to fall asleep, preemptively declaring her own victory) is a fierce debate over whether or not it’s going to be possible to get Josie to settle down in her own bed or if it’ll be a Pyrrhic victory rung through with her many cries for Momma and Daddy until morning, thus ruining any chance for a second round anyway.

Conceding, Mac sighs again.

“You can stay _ten minutes,_ Josie-Posie,” Will says, kissing her forehead. “I’ll close your curtains so you don’t hear the wind as much. You’re my brave girl, right?”

Smirking triumphantly, Josie nods.

And so, ice is retrieved (by Will, who extracts one of the many ice packs they have in their freezer, realizes it’s a rogue teething ring halfway back to the bedroom, and then decides that it’s good enough) and Josie is put between them under the covers (after Mac makes a short sweep of the sheets to make sure that nothing is… moist) and in no time, ten minutes have passed, and all three of them are asleep.

 

* * *

 

Her phone rings at a little past 3:30 AM. Carefully navigating Josie’s sprawled limbs Mac rolls out of bed, grabs her BlackBerry and her bathrobe, and creeps out onto the landing.

“What do you mean they can’t tell you when the building will regain power?” she hisses, eyeing the staircase up to the floor that houses Teddy and Charlie’s bedrooms. Jim, on the other end of the line (and quite possibly from the air mattress he decided to camp out on with Maggie in his office for the duration of the storm) gives her the same explanation that PSE&G gave him, about freezing wind chill and the twenty _residential_ blocks in midtown that are being given preferential treatment.

So, making a deeply disgruntled noise, she calls the heads of the Washington and LA bureaus and walks them through the contingency memo for this particular set of circumstances before emailing her New York EPs and, finally, calling Reese who in all likelihood already knows what’s happened and what’s about to happen.

Which is when she hears the second stair from the top creak, and looks up to see her son clinging to railing as he maneuvers his short legs down the steps.

“Is it morning, Mommy?”

Curled into his free arm are both his favorite (and of course, tattered and stained) blanket and his stuffed (because all of their friends are precisely that original) bear.

“Not yet, honey,” she murmurs, lowering the phone from her ear. “Go back to bed, I’ll be up in a minute to tuck you in. I’ve just got to chat a moment with Uncle Reese.”

But he continues his slow march down the stairs. Hearing her call reach voicemail, she hangs up and slides her phone into the pocket of her robe.

“But I need you, Mommy,” he says, voice warbling.

Outside, the wind continues to howl, even louder than before, and when thunder booms he all but leaps down the steps remaining and into her lap—it would appear that they are two for two this evening. Smiling tiredly, she combs his hair (blonde, like his sisters, Mac has no idea how they managed to produce _three_ blonde children, but she supposes that Charlie’s is beginning to darken) into some semblance of neatness with her fingers.

“Teddy bear…”

She fixes the neckline of his Captain America pajamas, trying to avoid the blue eyes that look remarkably like Will’s. (Not that she caves to Will and his big blue eyes. Often, anyway. At least not at work.

But there _is_ a reason that Josie is only fifteen months younger than Teddy.)

His lower lip wobbles. “I need you.”

The idea of sending him back into the dark upstairs becomes unfathomable, so she stands, swinging him up onto her hip. “Alright, bear, but you’re going to have to share with Josie, too.”

“But she kicks.”

(And don’t she and Will know it; Josie starting kicking at seventeen weeks in utero and hasn’t stopped since. Mac is convinced that her bladder still hasn’t recovered from that, nor from the other two inordinately large McAvoy babies that she’s borne.)

“Do you want me to put you back to bed?” she asks, wondering if he’ll change his mind.

But he shakes his head, rather vehemently, and clutches his blanket and stuffed animal to his chest, so she carries him into their bedroom. Quietly, she sets him down onto her side of the bed. As she slips out of her robe, Will rolls onto his side with the intent of asking about the content of her phone call. But instead he sees his son carefully setting up a barricade of pillows between himself and his sister, and Mac pushing through the door into his closet.

“Hey buddy,” he mumbles, half asleep. “Can’t sleep?”

“The wind is scary,” Teddy whispers, a little too loudly.

Careful to not disturb Josie, Will reaches up to ruffle the hair he knows that Mac has probably just fixed. “The house isn’t gonna blow down.”

“But I can’t sleep and it _sounds_ scary.”

It’s an important distinction.

“I know,” Will says, pulling back the duvet so that Teddy can slide under the covers, when Mac reappears at her side of the bed in leggings and one of his old sweatshirts. “So much for standing your ground, huh?”

Waving him off, she eases into bed next to Teddy, pulling pillows out of her way to make up for the loss in space.

“Shush,” she whispers, wrapping her arms around the little boy, “he was doing the thing with his chin and his lip and his eyes.”

Teddy promptly does the thing with his chin and his lip and his eyes, this time directed at his father. The effect is mitigated somewhat by the dim glow of the lone night light that Will and Mac keep on, but it is still has a significant effect on Will’s more primordial brain.

(He’s always been a sucker, that is.)

“I’m just saying,” he mutters, pretending to check that Josie has remained asleep.

Mac snorts, and then shifts her attention back to their son. “Come ‘ere baby, sleep on the outside.”

She gets him settled against her side, and then deconstructs the wall of pillows he’d built to protect himself from Josie, tossing those to the floor as well. It’s moments like these that they regret not going with the king mattress; after all, the kids are only going to get bigger.

And probably continue to invade their bed.

“Work called?” he asks in a low voice once she’s finished tucking Teddy’s blanket around him.

“Jim. Power’s out at the building, it’s gonna stay out. So you don’t have to bust out your snow shoes, we’re staying here.”

“What’s this ‘we’? You were planning on staying home anyway.”

Because, of course, school would be cancelled for the kids and one of them had to stay home with them, and _he’s_ the one who’s the _face_ of the network, and she’d see if the car service would make an exception for him.

Two feet of snow.

They live _twenty blocks_ from the newsroom. Snow shoes his ass. He’d be doing the broadcast from their living room using Charlie’s eyesore neon green sheets so the control room crew could CGI in a background.

Teddy tosses and turns a few times, his bear somehow landing next to Josie in the process.

“Go to sleep,” Mac says softly, trying to wedge him tightly to her side.

His arm crests Mac’s stomach. “Mommy, you and Daddy are staying home today?”

“We’re gonna have a snow day,” she answers, absently stroking his hair back into place. (It’s a habit the children hate; she’s constantly trying to fix their hair, neaten them up. The only one who’s grown into any patience for it is Charlie, who’s at an age where she enjoys having her mother brush her hair for her at night.) “We’re all gonna stay home.”

Rolling onto his front, Teddy rests his chin on her shoulder and looks up at her. “Can we go sledding?”

“Only if you wanna go sledding in hurricane-force winds, champ,” Will answers, his eyes closed.

“Yeah!” he answers, head popping up.

Will and Mac answer in a definitive chorus of “No.”

He pouts, disappointment weighing down all his small limbs. “What about hot chocolate?”

First sighing, then laughing, Will catches Mac’s eye briefly. “That, I think Mom and I can manage. Now go to sleep.”

“But it’s loud.”

This time he just sighs. “Teddy…”

Beginning to be rather desperate to go back to sleep herself, Mac grabs the duvet and pulls it up over his head, a moment later feeling Teddy burrow his head against her bicep.

“Here, better?” she asks, grabbing his bear and handing it to him under the covers.

He nods.

The shutters hanging outside their windows sound like they may tear off their latches and smash through a window, but they manage to fall back asleep, and stay asleep.

Outside, the weatherman’s prediction of two feet of snow begins to look conservative.

 

* * *

 

Will knows that he’s not someone who could be considered a light sleeper. Fatherhood has removed his ability to sleep through some things (a child’s cry, the dulcet sound of someone vomiting, Mac groaning that he’d better wake up because _the baby’s coming, so get up you asshole or I’m divorcing you_ ) but not everything.

So when his oldest child creeps through the door and, after surveying the situation, tiptoes her way to his side of the bed, he doesn’t wake up until _after_ she’s crawled on top of him.

“You’re really getting too big to get away with this maneuver, Charlotte.”

She sniffles derisively, tucking her head under his chin as she arranges herself atop his chest. “My room is cold.”

“And ours isn’t?” Despite himself, he wraps his arms around Charlie, anchoring her to him. It _is_ cold, and his seven year old makes for a good blanket, even if her toes are freezing against his shins.

“You’re warm,” she whispers. “Mommy says so all the time. She says you’re a furnace.”

Affectionately and irately by turns, usually depending on the time of year and whether or not she’s pregnant.

He huffs a tired laugh. “This has nothing to do with the wind and the ice and the thunder.”

“I’m not a baby, Daddy,” she mutters, pressing the soles of her cold feet to his calves in response to his teasing, and suddenly Will misses when she was small enough that her feet barely reached the middle of his thighs and he’d just wake up some mornings to find her dead to the world on top of him. But now she’s long-limbed, like Mac. “I’m not afraid.”

“You’re just cold,” he says, voice slanting towards audible doubt.

“And everything is so loud,” Charlie says, in a tone that is nearly whining, and resembles him in ways he’d rarely ever admit. “Even when I pull all my blankets over my head.”

“Do you think it’s any less loud in here?”

She heaves a long-suffering sigh, wrapping her arms under his shoulders and pressing her cheek to his chest. “You’re comfortable.”

It takes him a moment to realize that Charlie’s statement may not _entirely_ be a compliment.

_“What?”_

Pulling one hand out from under him she prods his waist. “Squishy. Like a pillow.”

“Are you calling me fat?” he balks, probably not as quiet as he should be. Until she giggles, and he remembers that he went to law school and knows what she’s trying to do. “Wait, no, that’s not the point—”

“Misdirection doesn’t work on Dad, honey,” Mac mumbles, blinking her eyes open into the dark. Curled onto her side facing the outside of the bed, she’s bookended by Teddy who has his back to her stomach and Josie who has somehow jammed herself back into Mac’s side, the crown of her head touching the base of Mac’s neck.

Charlie lifts her head.

“Sorry, Momma,” she peeps.

Trying to settle into a position that won’t cause her hips to protest without waking either of the children pressed up against her, Mac yawns. “Just go back to sleep, sweetheart.”

“Are we not even bothering with the pretense of making them sleep in their own beds anymore?”

Not that he makes any move to remove Charlie from on top of him, instead cupping the back of her head with his hand, carding his fingers through her soft thick hair.

“It’s five in the morning, I’m out of pretense,” Mac deadpans. “Unless you can scrounge some up.”

“Don’t make me go back to bed,” Charlie pleads, hugging herself to him as tightly as she can. “Please. Please, please, please.”

An over-exaggerated sigh is all the pretense Will can muster, conceding to Mac’s point. Charlie squeezes him tighter, her little fingernails digging into his t-shirt, and he strokes a hand up and down her back. Before remembering—

“Wait, why am I squishy?”

Mac snorts, deliberately _not_ thinking about how she was in similar position on top of Will a few hours ago. “Well, since the knee replacement you _have_ gotten a little round, not that I don’t still find you devastatingly handsome—”

Especially when she does that one thing with her hips that makes his face contort in a certain way, but she’d rather not let her mind wander there while there are children in bed with them. Still, the joke lands, and Charlie’s tiny laugh is felt against Will’s chest rather than heard when she hides her face in his shirt.

“Don’t giggle, little lady,” he says, almost sternly.

Affecting a pious expression, she bites down on her lower lip and looks up at him, resting her chin on his sternum. “Can I stay?”

“On top of me or in general?”

“Jojo kicks,” she whispers, casting her eyes over to her sleeping sister. In the darkness her face is mostly shadow, her eyes pinpricks of light reflecting the bare gleam from Mac’s night light, her wavy hair the color of burnished copper. Her features are wide, and angular, like Mac’s in miniature in more and more ways every day.

“Well,” he says, just taking a moment to admire her. “You should have considered that before climbing into bed.”

“Please, Daddy.” She pouts.

“Fine, fine. I can live with being comfortable…”

Really just wanting to get back to sleep (they probably have another two or three hours, depending on how long the blizzard keeps things outside dark) while he still can, he guides Charlie’s head back down and waits until her breathing evens out before falling back asleep himself.

When the alarm goes off at 7:30 Mac jerks awake, her hand slapping down to silence it immediately. Cringing, she slowly opens her eyes, and breathes a sigh of relief when she appears to be the only one awake. Gently, she repositions Josie so that she can turn onto her back, and rolls slowly towards the center of the mattress.

The room is dark, storm clouds still hanging low in the Manhattan sky. But it’s quieter, the wind calmer. Mac lifts her head, craning her neck to look through the iced-over windows at the front of the bedroom.

Which is when she sees that Will is also awake.

Bringing a quieting finger to his lips, he lowers Charlie from his chest onto the bed beside him. She stirs, but she’s old enough that a murmured “Go back to sleep, sweetheart,” in her ear has her nodding sleepily and burrowing down into the space he’s abdicating, easing himself out from under the covers.

Worrying her bottom lip between her teeth, Mac does her best to sit up without disturbing Josie or Teddy but can’t quite leverage herself into a sitting position. Groaning silently when Will laughs soundlessly at her, she holds her arms out. Answering her request for aid, he laces their fingers together and, very slowly, extracts her from between their two more precarious sleepers.

Taking the time to elbow him for laughing, Mac turns back to the bed to tuck Teddy and Josie back in, and pull Josie’s thumb from her mouth. Catching his hand again she pulls him out into the hall before one of them does something to disturb peace, and lets him go down the stairs first, following a few steps behind.

Mac doesn’t say anything when his hand winds up on her ass instead of on the railing.

She just backs him up against the counter once they reach the kitchen, blindly fumbling the on switch for the coffeemaker as she lifts herself up onto her tiptoes and presses their mouths together—a move which results in Will planting _both_ his hands on her ass and pulling her flush against him.

“How long do you think we have?” she asks, before nibbling on his lower lip.

Both their eyes flicker upwards. And when the wind begins to howl, towards the door out into the garden and the full-length windows along the back wall. Mac laughs, disbelieving of the snow drifts piled almost to the doorknob. “Well, fuck.”

“I’ll shovel it out so we can send the kids out to play in it,” he offers, ducking his head to kiss her again, sliding his tongue along hers. “Later.”

A wide grin splits her face.

“Later’s good,” she whispers, winding her arms around his neck.

And then they can stay in here, and watch the kids romp around in their small backyard and tire themselves out properly. Or not watch (too carefully, anyway), and find some _other_ way to pass the time.

By the time they hear Josie’s excited shout forty minutes later, they still haven’t done much more than get the coffee started.

(At least they’re dressed when she comes barreling into the room this time.)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
